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Uzbeks Say Inmate Due for Release Died in 2010

MOSCOW — The Uzbek government, lobbied by rights groups and pressured quietly by the United States to free a high-profile political prisoner, has finally revealed a secret: He died five years ago.

Akram Yuldashev, one of the most prominent religious leaders in post-Soviet Central Asia, died in prison in 2010 at the age of 52, the Uzbek authorities confirmed this month.

The news came with only a month remaining on Mr. Yuldashev’s 17-year sentence. The cause was said to be tuberculosis.

“I don’t think the government thought this through,” Steve Swerdlow, a Central Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a telephone interview on Monday, referring to the government’s policy of shrouding the death in secrecy for years.

Mr. Yuldashev’s death would inevitably have to be announced when it became apparent that he would never be released from prison, so by concealing it, the government risked further angering his followers and making him a martyr, Mr. Swerdlow said.

Mr. Yuldashev, a former math teacher and Communist Party member, emerged as a leader of the broad Islamic revival that flourished in the 1990s in the Fergana Valley, which sprawls across eastern Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and northern Tajikistan. His followers, who now number a few thousand, staged an uprising in the eastern city of Andijon in 2005 to protest corruption and the persecution of Muslims, which ended in bloodshed when government troops fired on the crowds.

While rights activists lobbied the government, State Department officials considered other approaches for pressuring Uzbekistan to release Mr. Yuldashev, working in consultation with his family.

American officials, as they have on a variety of rights issues in Uzbekistan, had advocated quiet diplomacy, lest the government of President Islam Karimov take offense or fear losing face in a public dispute, and retaliate by closing military supply routes to Afghanistan.

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Mr. Yuldashev’s widow lives in the United States and lobbied for years for his release. But three years ago, his family, dismayed by the lack of progress, started to accept the American government’s position that confrontation was counterproductive and diminished its public advocacy, Mr. Swerdlow said. The debate turned out to be moot, as Mr. Yuldashev was long dead.

Mr. Yuldashev’s movement tried to resolve the pressing debate of the mid-1990s — how to transition from communism to capitalism — with Islamic teaching. In a philosophical tract, he advocated capitalism and in particular ownership of small businesses like grocery stores or cafes as a moral lifestyle under Islam. Followers were supposed to adhere to guidelines, like paying workers respectable wages and contributing to a credit union to help other businesses. It was in sharp contrast to the raucous, capitalistic free-for-all gripping most of the former Soviet states.

By the late 1990s, however, Uzbekistan’s resurgent Communist-era leadership accused the group of terrorism and cracked down. A spiral of repression and resistance ensued. Mr. Yuldashev was imprisoned in 1999 on charges of terrorism after a bombing in Tashkent, the capital.

In 2005, his followers in Andijon overran a prison to free a dozen or so small-business owners, then staged a rally on a central square. Soldiers fired into the crowd. Human rights groups put the death toll at over 700, the worst shooting of protesters on a square since the Tiananmen massacre in China in 1989, but the government claims that fewer than 200 were killed.

Human Rights Watch is urging the United States government to take a more upfront stance on Uzbek rights abuses, including in meetings with Uzbekistan’s foreign minister, Abdulaziz Komilov, who is visiting Washington on Tuesday.

“The quiet approach has done nothing to give Uzbekistan an incentive to address its woeful record on torture, the ongoing imprisonment of government critics and religious believers,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

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A version of this article appears in print on January 19, 2016, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Uzbeks Say Inmate Due for Release Died in 2010. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe